Evangelicals and Race

Something new, real, and potentially very important is
happening among several groups of white evangelicals. A deep
conviction and growing passion about racial reconciliation is
taking root in the very unexpected soil of the white,
conservative Christian world.

First, some honesty. White evangelicalism simply has been
wrong on the issue of race for a very long time. Indeed,
conservative white Christians have served as a bastion of racial
segregation and a bulwark against racial justice efforts for
decades, in the South and throughout the country.

All during the civil rights struggle, the vast majority of
white evangelicals and their churches were on the wrong
sidethe wrong side of the truth, the Bible, and the gospel.
I will never forget the words spoken to me as a white evangelical
teen-ager by an elder in my home church when I began to ask
questions about our city of Detroit's painfully obvious racism
and its divided churches. Without apology he said,
"Christianity has nothing to do with racism."

Ever since, when evangelical Christians gathered to draw up
their theological concerns, the sin of white racism was nowhere
to be found. In recent years, when conservative white Christians
began to construct their political agendas, a recognition of
racism's reality was absent from the issues list of abortion,
homosexuality, tax cuts for the middle class, and, yes,
opposition to affirmative action.

But suddenly, all that appears to be changing. One of the
first signs was in the National Association of Evangelicals, the
country's largest group of evangelical denominations and
organizations. New NAE president Don Argue last year called
together black and white evangelical leaders and, in a dramatic
moment, confessed the sin of racism by white evangelicals, asked
forgiveness, and committed the NAE to forge new multiracial
relationships to change evangelical institutions. Even initially
skeptical black evangelical leaders became convinced that the new
direction was for real. Similar declarations of repentance have
been made by the Southern Baptist Convention and by white and
black pentecostals at a historic gathering that was dubbed the
"Memphis Miracle" (see "The Spirit Speaks,"
September-October 1995).

Perhaps the most visible white evangelical group now
passionately invoking the language of "racial
reconciliation" is the Promise Keepers. In their large
stadium rallies and in their list of "promises," a
commitment to build relationships between white, black, and brown
men has become more and more central to the Promise Keepers
mission. Black staff and board members of Promise Keepers testify
to the sincerity of the efforts, but the real tests are still to
come. Several Promise Keeper leaders came to Washington, D.C.,
and to Sojourners recently to discuss their hopes and plans for
advancing the agenda of racial reconciliation.

CLEARLY, PILGRIMAGES TOWARD racial reconciliation must lead to
concrete commitments to racial justice if the journey is to be
truly authentic. Sitting around the campfire together singing
"Kumbaya" and holding hands will not suffice. Outside
the church meeting rooms and stadium rallies where white and
black Christians are hugging each other is a nation where racial
polarization is on the rise, where the legacy of slavery and
discrimination is still brutally present, and where the majority
white population is signaling its tiredness with the
"issue" of race by voting down long-standing
affirmative action policies.

One black evangelical leader privately wonders whether his
white evangelical colleagues "who still hold the trump cards
will ever be willing to give them uppurse strings and the
decision-making power." Will "racial
reconciliation" just be "another fad," others ask,
or will white evangelicals let that commitment take them to
places they have never been before? Will they allow racial
reconciliation to transform the evangelical world, or will they
stop short of any real changes? "The crowd still looks
pretty much the same," observes one closely involved in the
process.

The approach that "we are all racists and need to
repent" is neither good theology nor honest history. In the
deepest and most honest sense, the real issue at stake in
American racial history is the idolatry of white supremacy, as
Eugene Rivers names it in his important article in this issue.
The persistence of white identity itself, with the accompanying
assumption of white privilege, is still the major obstacle to
real change in the racial climate. Italians, Swedes, Irish, and
Germans were never a common ethnic group, but all became
"white people" when they arrived in America.

Indeed, the "white race" was and is merely a
political construction to supply the ideology for oppression.
That is the ideology that must be dismantled if racial progress
is to be made in America. And because the ideology of the white
race is also an idolatry that challenges our true and common
identity as the children of God, its exorcism is a spiritual and
theological necessity. Will evangelical Christians demonstrate
the faith to overcome racism? That, ultimately, will be the test
of racial reconciliation.

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